Archiving tools have been used to preserve copies of electronic data in an organization at different instances. Archiving provided organizations with the ability to go back in time and identify a configuration of a computing system and/or the data stored on the system when the archive was created. Organizations have used archiving both to preserve electronic data and to comply with rules, regulations, and other legal obligations.
In the past, when archives were created, a copy of organization data would be exported or otherwise copied to an external archiving system. The archiving system was a separate and independent system from the other systems of the organization containing the data that was to be archived. The archiving system included its own storage medium for storing each of the archived copies of the organizational data created at different instances. This archiving storage medium was separate and independent from the storage medium used to the organizational data that was being archived.
Synchronization problems occurred between the different storage media. For example, during a data backup procedure, the different storage media were backed up at different times and/or at different rates. As a result, the backed up data varied from the archived data. For example, when the archiving and backing up occurred at different rates and at least partially overlapped with each other, the contents of the backed up and archived data would likely vary from each other. Additionally, in some instances separate and independent backup systems were needed for archiving as well as backing up the archives in the archiving system. These separate backup systems required additional maintenance and resources to set up, operate, and manage.
There is a need for an integrated archiving system that eliminates the need for separate archiving and/or backup systems requiring additional resources to set up, operate, and maintain.